• Lifeless wicket. Poor turn-out. Dour play. An epic mismatch. The first Test of the season couldn't be more underwhelming.

    THE FLAVOUR of the Australia summer is pace. A young tearaway in Pat Cummins has been discovered. And there's no doubt Australia would play to their strengths when India come visiting later this year. The hard and quick wickets will suit their pace arsenal that has grown impressively in their years of transition.

    Dhonis wicket keeping

    Meanwhile, at the Kotla Stadium, India are playing West Indies on a surface as lifeless as Mars — the sort of wicket you'd never expect to play on in a Test in Australia. The quality of opposition also reflects on how poorly India tend to build towards fixtures that matter.

    BQ

    In their last 10 years of touring, the only major Test team West Indies have beaten is South Africa, once. Having played them plenty of times this year, India would be aware of the obvious weaknesses of West Indies. Hence this home

    UL

    • Meanwhile, at the Kotla Stadium, India
    Read More »

  • Kapil Dev turned 50 on January 6 though for cricket fans the world over he will forever be young. He is still young in spirit and is a well preserved 50 thanks to his fitness regimen that he followed strictly during his playing days and I am sure he follows to some degree at least even now some 15 years after playing his final Test. He took the last of his 434 wickets in this match against New Zealand at Hamilton and of course that was the world record at the time.

     

    These days with bowlers taking over 700 wickets – albeit playing more Tests – the figure 400 may seem insignificant. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For any Indian bowler to hold the world record was a notable achievement but for an Indian opening bowler to do so was quite unthinkable. As one who grew up in the sixties when the Indian new ball attack was a farce I could never imagine that one day an Indian fast bowler would head the list of wicket takers in Test matches.

     

    Let cricket fans hail Sunil Gavaskar and

    Read More »

  • The issue of international stars skipping domestic matches has been the focus of much discussion for some time now. It's of course easy to say that with the packed international schedule there is hardly any time for the superstars to play in the Ranji Trophy or Duleep Trophy. While this is true to a point, there have been instances of cricketers not turning up to play in domestic cricket despite there being no international engagements because they had a shooting assignment to endorse some product or the other or for some unacceptable reasons.

     

    This was never the case in the past. From the thirties to the nineties international stars made every attempt to represent the state or zonal teams. It is important for stars to remember that it was the performance in these games that brought them to the limelight in the first place. And where would they be if they had not enjoyed the backing of their state association in the formative years? The least they can do by giving something back to

    Read More »

Pagination

  1. 419
(1,347 Stories)

Matches

Subscribe

[X]

How to subscribe

Roll over each section to subscribe using Add to My Yahoo! or RSS Feed feeds.

Yahoo! News offers dozens of RSS feeds you can read in My Yahoo! or using third-party RSS news reader software. Click here to find out more about RSS and how you can use it with Yahoo! News.